Month: October 2006

Early this year I put in two student mobility grant applications – UMAP and New Endeavour. The UMAP was the first in what I saw as a series of ‘semester in China’ grants for students to spend a semester in China. This first one I set up with Foshan University. Subsequent ones could look at the northern Chinese cities. I imagine in a few years this will build capacity in the community of emerging graaduaates – to work in China/ or for Chinese companies from Australia.

The New Endeavour application had similar aims – but being a bilateral grant ( for every one student to India, 3 will come to RMIT from India) it achieves more, and builds capacity in India too.

The two grants would occur simultaneously – from July to Nov 07 – and I am looking at students in three countries doing the same projects and sharing their work online. This was the hidden agenda for the content – I called it the Great Civilizations project.

The Project Plan: Being revised

2007 is going to be a different year: Here is what I have developed and am obliged to/required to do.
1. I am taking a group of students to India ( 3 probably), and a group to China ( 5 probably). And am hosting 9 students from India.

2. I have to teach a studies course on ‘Cultural Amplification’ ( see other post here) to introduce the students to C&I (China nd India), and also to tune in the students to be better hostss for the incoming students.

3. I have to do an event – if I am to be vaalued as a productive member of the school.

And so I have come up with a two stage process: a preparatory phase and an event phase. The event being a big C&I event.

Sketch of Event: Great Civilizations – C&I

1. The event will feel like a GRC. Similar Calendar – and schedule. We have a tacit understanding of this one event and can build another with the same typology. And Pam can be the Advisor on ‘how’ this in done.

2. The ‘Streams’/panel sessions will be set up through a process of invitation: A maximum of 10 parallel session can be offered. (eg: Scott runs a sesssion on ‘working with China’ and has as speakers among others Hugo, Brian/Sunbeam, himself, S Trathen, ….)

3. The streams will run along the linesof the TAGS set up by Industrial. This is one way to get the TAGS happening outwards.
4. The event will happen on wed, thu and fri of mid sem break week (10th week – the week after week 9) in second sem. The event will run between 9 AM- 5 PM.
5. The event will happen in the rooms of bldg 87, or other, relevant location. 5 rooms and 5 parallel sessions.

6. The Evenings (6.30 PM onwards) will have food, music and ‘polyglot-ish’ events. The event aims to attract in this session the hippies/indophiles/musos. This can happen in different parks/ RMIT-Jail, or even in the classrooms itself.

7. The studies course in sem 1 will work to set this up. The studies and elective course ion sem 2 will be the people actually working on this.

8. I will ask staff to help: Each staff member can offer to curate one or more TAGs.

9. Things that need doing: Liam for the publication of the event/ papers, Simon for the evenings, …